Has anyone hear ever bred crickets or do you still? I want to start to provide more for my archer fish however after searching many sites I'm still not to confident about it. I was just wondering if anyone had any tips or ever a total walkthrough of how they breed crickets.
Breeding crickets
- Thread starter bartier
- Start date
I have, not doing so right now. This is a good overview of what you need. www.anapsid.org/crickets
www.wormman.com also has a good article.
www.wormman.com also has a good article.
This is my personal experience from breeding crickets.
Me and my brother bought a bunch of "large" crickets from a cricket farm and placed a few hundred in a 40 gallon tank with fresh potting soil in it. I made sure the soil was moist but not too wet. If I recall correctly, the females are larger and have a black needle-like ovipositor coming out of the end of their abdomen. Mature crickets have wings (not sure if the females need wings but I'm thinking no). The crickets began laying the same day they came in, I guess they were ripe with fertilized eggs. After a few days we took out the adults and let the 40 gallon sit for about a week or so.
We thought we had babies when we saw a bunch of tiny insects literally swarming the entire bottom surface of the tank - it turned out to be those little tiny jumping bugs you see if you mess around in moist soil. The crickets themselves hatched a few days after this. We kept the babies fed with a mixture of finely crushed dog food along with some commercial cricket feed and also provided fresh veggies and a source of water. Make sure you provide a surface for the crickets to crawl over the water source like cotton balls, or they can drown. Depending on temperature your crickets will be the "small" sized crickets you get from fishstores in about a couple weeks. This is from personal experience and others might have different growth rates. Just make sure to change the food often so it doesn't spoil and try to always provide fresh clean water.
We didn't take the breeding to the next step by growing out the young and producing another generation, our arrowana required large sized crickets so we just repeated the breeding with a fresh batch because we were still buying crickets anyway. If you were to do this with a small sized scale I'd just use some 5 and 10 gallons but if you truly want to be self sufficient, I think it'd just get too messy and bothersome for you to deal with. If you just need baby or really young crickets for small sized fish or reptiles, this might be the way to go.
Me and my brother bought a bunch of "large" crickets from a cricket farm and placed a few hundred in a 40 gallon tank with fresh potting soil in it. I made sure the soil was moist but not too wet. If I recall correctly, the females are larger and have a black needle-like ovipositor coming out of the end of their abdomen. Mature crickets have wings (not sure if the females need wings but I'm thinking no). The crickets began laying the same day they came in, I guess they were ripe with fertilized eggs. After a few days we took out the adults and let the 40 gallon sit for about a week or so.
We thought we had babies when we saw a bunch of tiny insects literally swarming the entire bottom surface of the tank - it turned out to be those little tiny jumping bugs you see if you mess around in moist soil. The crickets themselves hatched a few days after this. We kept the babies fed with a mixture of finely crushed dog food along with some commercial cricket feed and also provided fresh veggies and a source of water. Make sure you provide a surface for the crickets to crawl over the water source like cotton balls, or they can drown. Depending on temperature your crickets will be the "small" sized crickets you get from fishstores in about a couple weeks. This is from personal experience and others might have different growth rates. Just make sure to change the food often so it doesn't spoil and try to always provide fresh clean water.
We didn't take the breeding to the next step by growing out the young and producing another generation, our arrowana required large sized crickets so we just repeated the breeding with a fresh batch because we were still buying crickets anyway. If you were to do this with a small sized scale I'd just use some 5 and 10 gallons but if you truly want to be self sufficient, I think it'd just get too messy and bothersome for you to deal with. If you just need baby or really young crickets for small sized fish or reptiles, this might be the way to go.